


The Roommate

by clarketomylexa



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Messy Artist Clarke, Modern Royalty, Royal lexa, oh my god they were roommates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2019-11-27 18:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18197897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarketomylexa/pseuds/clarketomylexa
Summary: Lexa is running away to forget who she is. Clarke is trying to find herself.ft. first in line to the throne Lexa and Clarke, the all-American roommate who calls her out on her royal bullshit





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I did promise to have this done about two weeks ago now but it didn't end up happening. Nevertheless, it made it eventually. I hope you enjoy.

Right now, her father thinks she is tucked away in the far corner of Africa, on a humanitarian mission to bring aid to a village wracked with famine. He may not be happy with it—he doesn’t seem happy with any decision Lexa makes of late—but he will no doubt be picturing her administering vaccines to sick children, draped in the royal crest or something equally befitting of her station. Perhaps Anya is with her in this fantasy of his. She is measuring Lexa’s hemlines and keeping her on the straight and narrow for the duration of the mission and Lexa is happily playing the role of the ‘humanitarian princess’ to the far-reaching media.

In reality she is pressing herself against the wall of the staircase in her assigned hall of residence, her university ID card clasped between her teeth. The ivy-covered, beaux-arts style building is teeming with students clamouring for their room assignment before their time in the unloading zone runs out—frazzled underclassmen and their entourage of family members peering at each door in search of the right one. It makes something tug in Lexa’s chest at the memory of Copenhagen last September—a far more clinical affair.  

She double checks the number listed on her form and looks at the door nearest to orientate herself. Most of the rooms on the second floor have their doors flung open to the corridor, filled with happy reunions or extended families putting up flat-pack furniture with Swedish instructions. The third on the right however, is shut. Tightly.

She knocks on the door of room 703, imagining that whatever roommate the woman at the residency department told her was an ‘absolute sweetheart’ has evaporated into thin air when, after a minute, no one answers. Shifting her duffle bag to her other shoulder, Lexa turns the handle experimentally,  opening the door to find a waif of a girl pinning a wall-sized tapestry to the wall beside her bed.

She tucks a lank lock of dip-dyed pink hair over her ear when she sees Lexa and beams.

“I thought I heard something,” she apologises profusely. “The people next door have been putting up IKEA furniture for an hour.” Lexa winces in commiseration. “I’m Clarke,” the blonde holds her hand out in greeting, “with an ‘e’.” She has a ratty t-shirt knotted beneath her ribcage and overalls that reach to mid-thigh.

Clarke is easily the most fascinating person Lexa has ever encountered.

She is about to take the handshake when a niggle in the back of her head stops her.

The point of coming to California was that it was the furthest place from home she could fathom, maybe not distance-wise but in terms of the culture. The university has promised to keep her presence on campus quiet pending a hefty donation to their business and politics programme on her father’s behalf—she has no interest in becoming tabloid fodder and a European princess ‘slumming it’ in Anya’s words at an American university was bound to turn heads—but she has no real responsibility to her family here. After so many years of playing the obedient daughter, the realisation isn’t one Lexa is prepared for.

“Lexa,” she says, taking the handshake with a practiced grip. Despite the consonants the name sounds soft in her mouth. No one has called her Lexa since she was a little girl and she is struck for a moment with the faint memory of floral perfume and candlelight, of sitting in her father’s lap while he plays Nocturnes Op. 9 No. 2  in E-Flat major on the grand in their apartments at the palace. But as quickly as it’s there it’s gone and Lexa is left feeling cold.

“I put the curtains up,” Clarke hitches a thumb towards the sheers that hang over the sash window touch the floor. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Lexa stares at the curtains, then at the room.

The tapestry Clarke had been fiddling with—a bold print of the sun rising over the crest of a wave—hangs from three tacks and covers the outlet for the fire-alarm and she has made her bed with a ruched white comforter and a lone yellow pillow case. Three stained jars stand on the desk at the foot of her bed. Her suitcase has been upturned if not unpacked but the jars and their contents—six unwashed paint-brushes, a stack of pencils held together with a hair-grip and a handful of broken chalk and charcoal—have been reverently arranged, as if on an altar. They form a neat line beneath her desk topper, finished with a dinky pot of English Ivy that looks as if it has seen better days.

“I don’t mind,” Lexa decides.

Clarke nods, a rapid up-down of her head that makes Lexa think she is making the situation uncomfortable. She rubs her socked foot absently over the ball of her ankle and roots her hands firmly in the pockets of her overalls. Lexa is about to launch into a lengthy monologue detailing how she is grateful that Clarke put up the curtains, because, for all of her preparation, it wasn’t something she would have ever thought of herself when Anya appears in the doorway, her shoulders curled in disgruntlement.

“These Americans,” she tsks in angry, rapid paced Danish, “they are hooligans Alexandra.”

Anya is the only person in her father’s household who can get away with addressing her by her name and get away with it and she thinks it has gone to her head. Even if she wasn’t allowed, Lexa has a funny feeling she would do it anyway. The one time she had protested, at the height of her self-importance in her first term at boarding school, Anya had given her a cuff around the head and told her not to be rude.

“Just as well you're not the one staying then,” she fires back in English, smile terse.

“Your father won’t be happy with this,” Anya warns gruffly.

She is under strict instructions not to tell her father of her true whereabouts until after she has moved in and started classes but Lexa can tell she is apprehensive about it. The King likes to dictate. If not his country then his family in the eyes of it. He has certain ideas—a lot of them mind numbingly archaic—of what kind of a daughter he wants her to be and he’s not a bad man but more often than not, Lexa finds it hard to remember that. After the fight they had before she left on her falsified relief mission, she isn’t entirely sure he won’t put Titus on a plane to bring her home and while the wrath of her father is one thing, the wrath of his advisor is another completely.

She would take a thousand of Anya’s petty scolding’s before she would let Titus belittle her again like a naughty school girl.

“My father doesn’t know what makes him happy,” she bites out in staccato and turns her back to set her duffle bag down on the stripped mattress. Then in English she says, “have a nice flight, Anya.”

For a moment it looks like Anya is going to disobey the thinly veiled order. Her jaw shifts so that Lexa is reminded of the angular woman who would be waiting for her at the start of half-term in a form-fitting suit and wingtips with strict instructions from her father’s secretary not to let Lexa disrupt his meeting with the Prime Minister when they go to the palace. Instead, she acquiesces with a measured nod and straightens the lapels of her tailored suit jacket.

“I’ll be at the Fairmont for the next three days,” she tells Lexa, then to Clarke, “good day.”

* * *

Clarke’s roommate might be a serial killer.

Or an assassin.

Or a Soviet spy.

She has a suitcase and a nondescript duffle bag to her name—the sum contents of which is a pile of crisp oxford shirts, chino pants, a generic bed set with the university sticker on the corner and a shower caddy with a set of toiletries from Target—and Clarke is almost sure the name she gave her is fake.

She speaks in a learnt British accent which Clarke is embarrassed to say makes her all the more attractive, but she can't seem to place the language her rapid paced exchanged with the angry blonde in the suit was in apart from the fact it sounded vaguely Northern European.

She’s nothing but polite when she asks what her major is—political science with a minor in global history—but aren’t psychopaths supposed to be personable? For all Clarke knows she has a body in her duffle bag.    

All of these are fears she shares with Octavia and Raven when she finds their dorm room on the way back from confirming her appointment with the dean of students for Tuesday morning. It’s on the bottom floor of Clarke’s hall—directly beneath hers so that if Lexa was ever to take her out they would at least hear her body hit the floor. Octavia is happy about it because she claims it will be easier to sneak Lincoln, her varsity swimmer boyfriend in after-hours even though they are Sophomores now and access to their dorms isn’t restricted.

They’re further along in the unpacking process than Clarke is. There are lights on the walls and a mirror hooked over the back of the door. Octavia’s bed is made with her boho chic comforter and obnoxiously overpriced Urban Outfitters pillows that Clarke was there to talk her into buying. She twists her fingers in the tassels and remembers driving into the city with Avril Lavigne blasting the weekend after her birthday like it is a world away.

“Maybe she’s a foreign dignitary,” Octavia suggests as she holds Raven’s sheet for her to tuck over her mattress protector.

Clarke tugs her feet into her lap where she is sitting on Octavia’s bed as she watches the spectacle. Her friends had broken the news that they had put in requests to the residency department to have each other as roommates this year over milkshakes in the diner off campus they found after their first drunken escapade to Frat row. They had been in a triple last year but when they had put in their preferences at the end of August after waiting to see if Clarke would surface, it was late enough that all that was left were doubles. Clarke had been too preoccupied until then to realise it would mean rooming with a stranger.

“Like a foreign dignitary is going to be conducting state affairs from a dorm room in San Francisco.”

“That’s a diplomat,” Clarke corrects Raven absently as she spots the stack of photos printed on glossy stationery store paper. “A dignitary is just an important person.” She slips the rubber band holding the stack together onto her wrist and begins to sift through the snap shots of last year, fingers linger on her own smile.

“I forgot you took a politics paper last year,” Raven teases.

“Practically Hillary Clinton,” Octavia rolls her eyes.

Smiling, Clarke flips to a photo of the three of them in Laguna Beach on Spring Break last April, bikini-clad and sand-dusted, sporting tan lines that Clarke wouldn’t get rid of until well until June and she’s unprepared for the force it hits her in the chest with. For a moment she struggles to breath, eyes smarting as she remembers the trip and what she came home to. It feels suddenly as if she is drowning in the waters she spent her summer learning to swim in.

“Who knows?” she takes three deep breaths and arranges her face into a smile. She knows it won’t fool her friends but she knows they won’t ask either. “Maybe I can make a career out of it.”

“You’re still undeclared?” Octavia winces.

Clarke ignores the implication of ‘still’ and nods.

“As far as the university is concerned.”

Dropping out of pre-med wasn’t a hard decision. The hard decision was trying to figure out what she was supposed to do now that the one thing that had always been there was gone.

She spent the summer drawing—driving Jake’s old station wagon out to the heads with In-N-Out Burger and sitting with her knees on the steering wheel and her sketchpad in her lap. The result was a portfolio of hyper realistic lighthouses and half thought out sketches of memories that earned her an appointment with the dean of arts and although Abby wasn’t happy about her going into Sophomore year undeclared, she hadn’t said anything overt and for that, Clarke was grateful.  

She fixates on the next photo in her hand—a blurry shot of her and Raven, dog-piled on the bed in her Freshman dorm room, red-eyed and washed out by the flash—and ignores the look she knows Octavia and Raven are sharing at her expense. She knows what they’re thinking because she has been hearing it since July. How well she is coping ‘all things considered’.

It makes her feel like somehow she’s more of a person for coming out the other side of it unscathed which is stupid, really, because she’s still Clarke.

A little less sure, maybe.

A little more messy.

But still Clarke.

* * *

When Clarke returns an hour after politely informing her she was going to find her old roommates, Lexa is in the middle of making her bed. She has the mattress protector on the mattress and the fitted sheet tucked onto the corners but the top-sheet evades her. It seems to be more than one person can handle and she pushes away the thoughts of panic that threaten to climb up her spine at the thought. She resolves to pull the comforter over the whole mess and let it be.

She has unpacked too but despite her efforts her half of the room still looks devastatingly bare. Her bedding is white, her wall is blank and her desk is empty apart from a single vinyl covered binder but short of going to the campus bookstore and decking herself out in merchandise she doesn’t know how to rectify it.

It’s not like she can put up a family photo.

She abandons her effort to make her empty pin board look homely and sits on her bed watching Clarke stare at the t-shirts she has laid out on the comforter. There’s an uncomfortable edge to her that wasn’t there before she left. She blinks furiously and for some reason, Lexa can’t bear the thought that she is going to cry.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” she says lamely. Suddenly the thought of her roommate in tears terrifies her and not just because she would be at an utter loss for how to handle it.

“For what?”

“For my friend,” she explains, choosing her words carefully. ‘Security, minder, and advisor’ is simply too incriminating. “She’s having a hard time letting go.”

It’s not a lie.

Clarke nods like she understands, busying herself with folding her t-shirts and stowing them in the plastic bins she stacks under her bed and Lexa is struck with the feeling that, unlike everyone else who commiserates thoughtlessly, Clarke actually does. There’s something in the slow dip of her chin that makes Lexa feel vulnerable.

“Are you close?” she asks. “You and your friend.”

Lexa considers that for a moment.

“We have our moments,” she decides.

That makes Clarke laugh and Lexa stands up straighter for it.

Satisfied, she returns to her pin board and sticks the thumb tack through the form the woman at the residency department gave her, printed on neat university letterhead and steps back from the wall. It sags lamely against the blank frame and she takes it down a moment later deciding no pin-board is objectively better than one that looks like a pathetic metaphor to her rash decision to run away.

“Here.”

She whips her head around to see Clarke standing at her shoulder, the pot of English Ivy cradled in the crook of her elbow. When she frowns, confused, Clarke  places it carefully on the pockmarked surface of Lexa’s desk, arranging its drooping leaves around the rim of the pot.

“You can probably take better care of it than I can,” she shrugs.

Lexa holds herself to it.

* * *

They fall into an easy rhythm of moving around each other.

Lexa is an early riser—ten years of boarding school ensured that the instinct to wake up before seven a.m. on a weekend is ingrained in her bones, not to mention that a childhood of state visits have taught her that the best way to combat jet-lag is a routine—and she gathers her shower caddy while Clarke is asleep most mornings, returning to their dorm ten minutes later wrapped in a towel with her hair pinned up.

She is dressed by the time Clarke wakes and leaving for the dining hall as she disappears down the hall to the bathroom and usually filling up her plastic mug at the sink in the floor’s kitchenette to carefully water the pot of Ivy which begins to flourish under her rigorous watering schedule—once a day, first thing in the morning while it is still relatively cool. 

She is a responsible plant owner if nothing else.  

Lexa has the reading list for her ‘rights, justice, and democracy in the Western tradition’ class and she checks the documentaries it lists out of the library to watch cross-legged on her bed. It seems like the best pass-time until classes start on Monday seeing as she thinks Anya would have an aneurysm if she saw Lexa taking part in one of the so called ‘orientation’ activities they have each day.

Mostly it’s frat parties and students in t-shirts that say ‘mentor’ across the back handing out condoms on the quad but Lexa doesn’t know anyone yet to make it worth venturing outside of her dorm room, aside from Clarke and the two girls who poke their heads into her dorm one day to ask where Clarke is and how her ‘state duties are going’.

They are an oddly complete pair. Roughly the same height, one with her hair down and the other scraped back into a ponytail and for a moment, Lexa’s heart leaps out of her chest at the thought of being recognised. But then the taller one cuffs the shorter around the back of her head with a giggly ‘fuck off, O’ and she assumes it is some sort of joke she isn’t privy to.

It makes something like loneliness clutch at her chest.

They don't recognise her.

She doesn’t expect them to.

She’s no Meghan Markle and even then the American fascination with the monarchy only goes as far as the British. Lexa would even go as far as to say the anonymity college life has afforded her thus far is weirdly comforting if it wasn’t for the fact that it makes her feel so utterly lost in the woodwork.

Clarke, on the other hand, is anything but anonymous.

Lexa already knows that her roommate exists in a way that is so completely foreign to her own standoffish upbringing at the hands of her boarding school tutors and the prescribed weekly phone call home to her father from the oak panelled office of the principal—her father’s long-time friend and the owner of an obscure European title. Clarke is always talking, always moving, always living in these fits and starts that mimic the way she draws—using short, sharp strokes over her sketchpad until they come together to form a line, and from that, an object but always when she thinks Lexa isn’t watching. For someone so absolutely unapologetic, she is oddly protective of her artwork. Lexa thinks she must be good at it. Passionate in the least with the frequency in which she sees charcoal staining the tips of her fingers or hands.  

There are second-hand biographies of Van Gogh and Matisse stacked in the shelf above her desk and textbooks relegated to the plastic bin beneath her bed. She makes instant Ramen in the kitchenette in the common room at eleven p.m. because despite Lexa’s quiet prodding, she has only appeared in the dining hall for dinner twice since they moved in, finding herself glued to a menial task that takes her through dinner instead. And on the rare occasion that her friends—Octavia and Raven are their names—manage to drag her down, she sits pink cheeked and breathless across from them, nodding into her bowl as if she has remembered at the last minute the food is a vital part of the digestive system.  

Twice this week she has gone out saying she needs detergent only to return forty minutes later with two paper bags from her favourite bakery in the city offering no explanation other than she had a ‘craving that needed to be satiated’ and Lexa had to try very hard not to hear the way she lingered on the word.

All these things, Lexa watches carefully as they reveal themselves, waiting for the day the short strokes will come together for form a whole picture of Clarke but they never do. They stay a haphazard outline of something that is there but not, smudged around the edges like it has been altered and altered until it is altogether different from what it was.

She’s still pondering charcoal dusted fingertips and instant ramen when Octavia and Raven appear in the doorway the Saturday before classes start, all long-legs beneath denim mini skirts and skimpy tops despite the late Spring weather.

It’s so different from anything Lexa has been allowed to don under Anya’s hawk-like gaze. The knowledge that she could go with them when Octavia and Raven ask if she’s coming out—the end of orientation is marked by what the locals call a ‘football game’ but what Lexa has asserted is anything but football and after-parties that ‘last for days’ according to two girls she passed in the quad—leaves her oddly unsure of herself. She suddenly longs for the structure of Anya’s impeccable schedule kept with military precision and the gentle russet of leaves in Autumn of home, then scolds herself, remembering what it would entail.

Shaking her head, she gestures at the documentary paused on the screen of her laptop.

“History?” Octavia winces, perching on the end of Clarke’s unmade bed.

“Politics,” Lexa corrects her.

Octavia looks equally unenthused.

Half an hour later, Clarke rips through the room like a tornado. She has a stapled pack of papers in her hand, half of a bagel pilfered from the dining hall clamped between her teeth and an air of confusion about her like none of her limbs are acting quite in accordance to the others as they move to do three things at once.

“Sorry,” she apologises, throwing her backpack down at the foot of her bed, “sorry.” Her fingers find the hem of her shirt and peel it off over her head without hesitation. Raven lets out a low wolf-whistle and Lexa quickly averts her eyes. “My meeting ran over time.” She runs a hand through her hair and surveys the contents of her closet. “Please tell me I’m not late.”

“I told Lincoln to save the tequila ‘till we get there,” Octavia mimes a dance move and Clarke smiles.

She takes a hanger out of the closet and pulls the scrap of black fabric it holds over her head until it forms a form-fitting cropped singlet, exposing a long oblong of midriff between the hem and the waistband of her shorts that makes Lexa sweat beneath her tidy button up. She’s so utterly blasé about it, stamping her shorts down her legs on one foot as she scavenges for the jean-skirt that sits beneath her comforter from the three changes it took to get ready this morning—Lexa counted all of them, ostensibly consumed by her documentary.

It makes her feel prudish in turn.

When they leave twenty-minutes later, Lexa has seen more of her roommate than she thinks she ought to have.

Octavia and Raven stand on the threshold with impatient reminders of ‘they’re not going to wait forever’ and ‘c’mon Griffin, we’re missing beer pong’, but Clarke makes them wait, scurrying around the bomb-site that is her half of the room for her phone.

She pauses in the doorway, smelling of perfume and charcoal, and looks over at Lexa.

“I won’t be late,” she says needlessly.

Lexa nods, fighting her discomfort. “Have fun.”

Clarke smiles, lingering and Lexa is at a loss. Thus far America is different to home in so many ways—from the stagnant Californian climate to the overbearing friendliness that everyone who sees her greets her with—she wonders if she is missing some sort of unspoken social cue. Clarke stares at her like she has something important to say and Lexa wants to hold her breath until she does.

Instead, when she does speak it’s to say ‘happy studying, Lexa’ in a barely-there voice and it leaves Lexa with the strangest sense of being an unfinished thing. She touches her arm briefly, if only to make sure she isn’t a sculpture, half-fashioned out of clay.

Clarke returns at three a.m. with Octavia’s jacket around her shoulders, reeking of the kind of cheap spirits her classmates would smuggle into the dorms in the bottom of their trunks at boarding school.

They would pull it out after the housemistress had done her rounds at nights, emerging for breakfast in the mornings nursing sore heads that the staff would turn a blind eye to but the one time Lexa got caught taking a swig of Russian vodka straight from the neck of the bottle a girl on her floor had shoved under her nose the night after completing her final exams, her father had been notified within minutes.

It took a two day grilling from his men when she returned to the palace to assert she wasn’t under the influence at the time her exam had been taken and she felt like a petty criminal for a week.

The memory of it still very much intact, Lexa lies facing the blank wall, jet-lag keeping her awake as Clarke navigates the minefield of the floor as sure-footed as a drunk Sophomore can. The closet opens. Lexa tries to ignore the whisper of fabric against skin and when a foot connects with the end of the bed, Clarke slurs out an awkward ‘fuck’ in two separate syllables.

Lexa lies awake well after her roommate’s breathing has evened out and comes to the conclusion that ‘Clarke with an ‘e’’ is a bit of a mess.

* * *

“Did I wake you?” Clarke whispers thickly, peeling herself off of her bed.

It’s two a.m. and she feels groggy. The so-called ‘Freshman Plague’ that she managed to avoid last year has come back for her with a vengeance and the remnants of her hangover aren’t helping either—she feels like she is three-fifths alcohol and two-fifths a raging headache.

Lexa stands above her in pyjamas and a pair of round, tortoiseshell glasses that Clarke has noticed her slip on as she reads through her coursework and they make her feel all sorts of shameful things. She kicks them away and pushes her face into her comforter to staunch the blush that threatens to rise to her cheeks.

Lexa shakes her head.

“It’s two in the morning,” she says.

“Fuck,” Clarke quells the hot flash of panic that shoots through her as she grapples for her phone to double check. When the numbers blink at her in confirmation, she drops her into her hands and groans. Classes start tomorrow and true to form she waited until the latest possible moment to check her school emails which contained a lengthy monologue from her art history professor asking them to read the first chapter of the textbook ahead of the lecture so they could get off to a ‘running start’.

He seems cherry. Enough that she won’t be wanting to pound her head in with her textbook each time she steps into his class. But a paragraph into ‘The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art’ and she is already ready to throttle him.

She runs her fingers through her hair and slams her laptop with a crack. “I have class at eight,” she mutters.

“I could wake you if you like?”

Clarke shakes her head. “You don’t have class ‘till eleven.”

She knows this because Lexa was sure to print out her class schedule and tack it to the pin board that sits vacant above the head of her bed. The emptiness of her whole half of the room still baffles her but she doesn’t have the heart to ask lest she pull up some long buried feelings. She has enough of them of her own to deal with.

“I have a meeting with the dean of students at half-past seven,” Lexa explains. “I’m happy to do it.”

Her oddly formal cadence sounds strange this late but Clarke is glad she hasn’t raised her voice past a whisper. It fits somehow in the stagnant room—not even the sheers are moving even though they have had the widows flung open for the last three days to combat the heat.

It’s been a week but every time Clarke looks at her Lexa seems so startling out of place wandering the halls of the university. She peers at her now, in her ridiculous pinstripe pyjamas, monogrammed on the pocket with a tiny ‘A.M.’ in light, looped thread.It must stand for something. She uses ‘Woods’ as her surname whenever it’s needed but there is a reluctance to the way she tacks it onto her name that makes Clarke think it’s fake. She suddenly she becomes aware how little she knows about her roommate. She also becomes aware of how much she _wants_ to know.

She fascinates Clarke if she is being honest.

“If you’re sure,” she acquiesces after a long, unsteady moment.

Lexa gives a sharp nod of her chin. “I am.”

And it’s settled.

“Okay,” Clarke says, keeping her smile to herself. “Thank you.” She peels back her comforter, all too happy to ensconce herself into the nest of her untucked sheets but as groggy as she feels, but the exhausted tug of her eyelids isn’t enough to urge her to sleep even with her eight a.m. class looming. A few minutes later, she sits, batting her comforter in frustration.

Lexa stands on her side of the room with her cell phone tucked beneath her chin.

“Why are you still up?”

Her head snaps up, alarmed when Clarke speaks.

“If I didn’t wake you,” Clarke amends softly.

Lexa taps her phone against her chin. “Jet-lag,” she says vaguely.

It’s the first time she has acknowledged the elephant in the room—that is how glaringly un-American she is—and it shocks Clarke. She hadn’t realised she had been in a rut of actively ignoring the obvious until now.

“What’s the time difference?”

“Eight hours.”

“Yikes,” Clarke winces. Her only experience with jet-lag were the annual pilgrimages of her childhood to her grandmother's New England Colonial and at eight-years-old, the three hours had been enough to completely knock her off her feet, hangover or not.

Lexa appraises her, shoulders hooked over her knees and toes pressed into the edge of her mattress. She feels underdressed in her thrift-store ACDC t-shirt next to Lexa’s unusual brand of formality and is prepared to go to sleep and leave her to her pacing when Lexa drops abruptly to her bed. The mattress groans.

“I’m sorry if I’m keeping you awake,” she whispers.

“You’re not,” Clarke assures her quickly. She suddenly feels desperate to hold onto his interaction. Life has become inordinately messy lately but swathed in darkness of the dorm she has the strangest sense of being able to breath for the first time since summer.

Lexa smiles and smooths her fingers over the cold screen of her phone. The dingy, yellow light from the streetlamp is enough for Clarke to make out the intensity of Lexa’s absent frown.

“I’m waiting on a phone call,” she admits after a long, silent moment.

“You’re friend?” Clarke guesses.

“My father,” Lexa shakes her head. The mere mention of his name has her seizing up and Clarke senses they might be more similar than they know in that regard. Just for different reasons. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

“You ran away?”

“I made a tactical retreat,” Lexa corrects her primly, making no effort to hide the smile chipping at the frown seemingly rooted to her lips. Clarke watches it’s shackles loosen and the ice keeping her face twisted into perpetual worry thaw until her top lip quivers like the first bloom through the snow and the smile she earns feels like a victory in a battle she hadn’t known she was fighting. She smiles.

Clarke rolls her eyes at Lexa who demurely smooths her comforter under her hand. “Okay, Saving Private Ryan.”

Lexa cocks her head.

“The Steven Spielberg film,” Clarke prompts. Her cheeks heat when Lexa doesn’t seem to register her joke and she waves her glib comment away—it was too abrasive for this midnight conversation, anyway. “It was the first war movie that popped into my head,” she explains, self-conscious now in all the wrong ways. Her tee feels threadbare and she suddenly doesn’t know how to react to Lexa, who is giving her more than the perfunctory niceties they have been exchanging over the course of the week. “You said ‘tactical retreat’.”

“I did,” Lexa confirms, without a flicker of recognition.

“Steven Spielberg is a director,” Clarke blurts suddenly. “A famous one. People say he like ‘invited’ new Hollywood in the seventies. My dad loves—” She stops and lets the barb pull against her head. “Loved him.”

She rambles because she doesn’t know any other way to fill the void that has opened it’s ugly mouth in the middle of their dorm room. It feels all consuming. She fills it with words if only to stop it from swallowing her whole. Meanwhile Lexa watches her with quiet amusement. Her head is cocked and she bites her lip. She nods with a deep, soulful expression on her face that has to be fake.

“You know who Steven Spielberg is,” Clarke deduces off, utterly embarrassed and feeling the heat crawling up her neck. “Don’t you?”

Lexa’s lips twitch. “I’m a foreigner, Clarke, not an imbecile. ‘Dødens Gab’ was my favourite film.”

“What?”

“Jaws,” Lexa repeats in English.

Before Clarke can begin to think about a young Lexa in a tidy button up, peering intently at Chrissie Watkins as she meets her end skinny dipping—a big moment in Clarke’s childhood if she is being honest with herself—the obnoxious chirp of Lexa’s cell phone cuts through the room and Clarke cringes into her comforter.   

“I apologise,” Lexa says, suddenly rigid as she taps the screen. The glow illuminates the crease that is back, rooted firmly between her brows and pulling her lips down at the edges and she rises from her bed as if she is addressing the room. Regal and elongated. “I need to take this.”

She shuts the door behind her and Clarke curls a finger around the top of her sheet as she watches her move in the thin oblong of light the light in the corridor gives off.

She speaks in short, throaty syllables—hisses of ‘ja’ and chastened and reluctant mutters of assent. A stretch of disgruntled silence gives way to a rapid string of foreign words and Clarke lies on her back, scrutinising the ceiling. There’s a chip out of the moulding where the ceiling meets the wall and she wonders idly what poor Freshman tried to hang decorations without Command hooks, if only to keep herself from eavesdropping. Not that it would do much good. She makes a mental note to google ‘Dødens Gab’ in the morning.

A  moment later, Lexa returns, a curious dichotomy in the way she stands drawn up tight and how she closes the door gently behind her. Clarke studies at her through the darkness not sure what to do next. She fiddles with the edge of her sheet and sucks the underside of her lip against her teeth.

When Lexa rallies herself, back to her, she raises on her elbow.

“Bad call?”

Lexa’s fingertips whiten around the edge of her cell phone. “Do you ever feel as though you could walk off the edge of the earth and there would be no one there to break your fall?” When Clarke doesn't respond, mouth wired shut and jaw working at the truth of her words, she smiles, peering over her shoulder to fix Clarke with an intent little stare. "Good night, Clarke," she whispers. “Goodnight, Lexa,” she mimics, curling her toes and feeling the mattress give beneath her. She tucks her comforter form beneath the mattress with her foot and rolls onto her side.

Lexa lingers.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the response for last chapter! This took a little while sorry but I hope you enjoy!

Two weeks into the semester it becomes abundantly clear that Lexa is completely unequipped for life outside the palace. It makes the whole ‘I’m an independent woman and I don’t need you or your advisors to spoon feed me my entire life’ spiel she gave her father before she left null and void and she simmers in quiet embarrassment over her heaped pile of dirty laundry under her bed for days before deciding the oxford shirt she had been wearing every day isn’t going to make it another.

She presses her nose to the collar and discards it despondent into the cracked plastic hamper kept in the awkward space beneath her bed. It had been Clarke’s until she reappeared after class one afternoon with a collection of purchases from Target and she offered her old one to Lexa seeing as Lexa was using her suitcase to store her laundry.

Simply having one made Lexa feel slightly more put together but the fact is, the entire contents of her suitcase lives there now—shirts, socks and chinos. She ventured down to the laundry room one day when she had a free morning but after ten minutes of looking blankly at the rickety machine, people were beginning to stare and she made her second tactical retreat of late, back to her dorm room none the wiser and twice as embarrassed.

She checks her phone and stares around the room.

Clarke has two classes this afternoon, after which she disappears to the dining hall for dinner with Raven and Octavia and doesn’t appear until after eight to spread herself out on her bed and ignore tomorrow's reading. Resolute, Lexa pries the card Anya organised for her—topped up with a monthly allowance on her father’s dime—and slips it into her pocket before making her way across campus.

The bookstore is two storeys high and only half of it is books.

They were helpful for her textbooks and the English copy of her childhood favourite ‘The Invisible Man’ that now sits on the floor by her bed, but today she heads straight through the novelty keychains and thermos’ to where the racks of university-branded clothing are held at the back of the store.

If there is one thing she has learnt—despite the fact that her classes thus far have been covering rudimentary knowledge at best—it is that California is not home. The language is different, the culture is different but most of all the climate of different and it has led to her sitting in lecture halls sweating beneath the rolled up sleeves of her pressed oxford shirts. Making a snap decision, she drapes every item of clothing in her size over her arm—t-shirts and shorts in the school colours as well as cardigans, socks, sweaters and the sweat-pants which she has discovered she is sorely lacking.

It’s all so violently American. She stares at herself in a pair of red terry cloth shorts with the school mascot in the corner and a standard grey t-shirt and can hardly recognise the girl who left Denmark on a whim three weeks ago, simmering in quiet rage over a petty fight. Her hair is scraped up off the back of her neck and the shorts sit low across her lips, a strip of skin becoming visible between her waistband and the hem of the shirt when she stretches upwards.

She doesn’t know if she’s being childish. She thinks she is. But Anya used to joke that Lexa was too far up her father’s ass—her words and ones that she wasn’t strictly supposed to use around the young princess—to ever go through a rebellious phase and running away was the only version of lashing out that she could fathom. She needed to breathe air that hadn’t been vetted and curated for her, lest she fades away under the weight of nothing but her father’s expectations and the oil paint portrait of herself hanging in the palace halls.

Her mother’s face floats to the forefront of her mind and she pointedly ignores her.

There are worse things she could be doing than getting a college education.

Undressing and redressing quickly, Lexa emerges from the fitting room resolute. She takes the wad of clothes, and then some, to the check-out, picking up a mug and a novelty keychain from a basket as she waits in the queue on a whim.

It feels good to spend her father’s money. After their midnight phone-call—carefully scheduled against his meetings and appointments for the day with no thought for the time difference whatsoever—every subtle victory she could claim for herself felt like a reason to celebrate. He had ordered her, in no uncertain terms, to return to Denmark on the next available flight. She had told him that was unequivocally not possible. She had brokered a deal with the university, none of this would reflect badly on him or the country, the press wouldn’t be involved. After a certain amount of back and forth he had agreed, reluctantly, to sponsor her stay for only as long as he deemed fit. Tired and oddly affected by her conversation with Clarke, she had agreed.

Now, she places her purchases down on the counter and swipes the card without remorse. Bag in hand, she strides through campus with her shoulders set and returns to her dorm to find a roommate who is donning ripped jeans and a slouchy hoodie in front of the mirror on the inside of her closet. She watches Lexa heave her bag onto her bed as she fixes her hair up in the mirror.

“Big day?”

Lexa looks up in fright.

“What?”

“Your haul,” Clarke nods to the bag.

“Oh,” Lexa says as she surveys her purchases. She takes a t-shirt out of the bag and spreads it over her plain comforter, noticing the bitter new clothes smell she has only been privy to once or twice in her life. Usually, the staff would get to anything Lexa bought before she was able to wear it, clucking in Danish about ‘extra dye’ and ‘chemicals’ and whatever it was would end up laundered in her closet the next morning. She brings the shirt up to her mouth and snaps the tag of between her teeth before holding it up against the light. “I needed new clothes,” she decides.

Turning away from Clarke, she holds the t-shirt against her chest with her chin and slips her fingers down the buttons of her button up, shrugging the starched fabric off of her shoulders to pull the t-shirt over her head. She swings her arms until it falls right over her torso and appraises herself in the triangle of free real estate in the mirror in the hollow of Clarke’s elbow.

She looks different.

Unrecognisable.

For the briefest moment she considers dying her hair and changing her name once the semester is over. With Anya dismissed she could effectively be knee deep in the Peruvian jungle by the time her father realised she was missing. She could free solo climb El Capitan or drive Route 66 bare-shouldered like Thelma and Louise. It’s a lovely fantasy. Naive and idealistic perhaps, but it’s hers.  

“You look good in school colours.” Clarke pulls her out of her reverie and it leaves Lexa with the strangest sense of longing deep within her chest. She wants to crawl inside herself, root around her ribcage and pull it out in order to make sense of it but it is fleeting, and as soon as she makes eye contact with Clarke in the mirror it is gone. Clarke smirks and mimes a fist-pump. “Go Cardinals.”

“Mockery is not the product of a strong mind, Clarke,” she shakes the dreads of wistfulness off her back and musters up a simpering smile.

“Did you just sass me?”

Lexa bites her lip as she continues to sort through her purchases, maintaining an air of innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She glances up in the midst of folding a pair of crimson sweat-pants with printed white lettering down the leg—the only colour they had in her size—and finds Clarke rolling her eyes. They share a smile and Lexa feels the wings of a caged bird beat in her chest.

Her new clothes make-up a large proportion of her closet space now. She stacks the t-shirts, rolls the sweat-pants up tightly and hangs the cardigan, crimson with fat white bands around the arm, on a hanger next to her oxford shirts, but the awkward juxtaposition of it all makes her cringe.

“Do you have plans for tonight?” Clarke asks finally turning away from the mirror. She leans against the closed closet to watch Lexa, fumbling with the knotted drawstring of her hoodie.

“Not unless you count,” Lexa leans over her desk and checks the cover of her textbook for the author, “Walter L. Hixson as stimulating company.” She is diligent with her readings, has been actively trying to finish them a week in advance but her professors seem to be wanting her to read more of them each week.

“Do you want to come to Octavia and Raven’s with me?”

Lexa pauses and peers at her sceptically. Octavia and Raven have been nothing but friendly to her since they met. But they’re loud and brash and, if the way they lay themselves out over the dorm is any indication, they have no sense for personal space. Lexa thinks it might just be the culture but she would be lying if she said it didn’t overwhelm her. Clarke is chaos enough.

“It’s just a movie night,” Clarke promises, hands thrown up in surrender. “A weekly thing. Lincoln might be there. And maybe Octavia’s brother if he has the night off but it’s nothing flashy,” she gestures to her own outfit as if in proof.

Lexa has to agree she looks cozy.

“Okay.”

“Really?” Clarke’s head snaps in surprise.

“Yes,” Lexa nods.

A baptism by fire is exactly what she needs.

* * *

Octavia kisses her on the cheek when they arrive at the door.

She swims, flush-cheeked in a grey t-shirt, Lincoln's judging by the powerful whiff of cologne Clarke smells with she moves. Behind her, Raven shakes a silver hip flask and mimes taking a swig and Clarke nods. Octavia ushers them inside and gives sweeping introductions to the bodies draped over the furniture.

Lincoln is in sweatpants and a muscle tee slung low over his chest, leaning against the headboard of Octavia’s bed behind a rumpled patch of comforter where her friend had been sitting. Harper and Monty are tangled into each other on the beanbag at the foot or Raven’s bed and Roma has a can of cheap beer dangling from the circle of her fingers. It’s easily more people than strictly legal but they haven’t been pulled up by the RA yet and so their weekly ritual prevails.

In most ways, she’s grateful for it.

The room reeks of the bottle of vodka Octavia keeps down the side of her bed—a birthday present from Bellamy who’s benevolence never ceases to amaze—and the mindless easy listening Spotify playlist they put together as a group last year is playing out of Raven’s phone. Harper drapes herself over Monty to argue with Roma over who bought the pizza last week. The familiarity of it lends her a calm that she has been hard to find within herself lately and she lowers herself to the shag rug with a cushion from Octavia’s bed.

Lexa stands in the middle of the room in her t-shirt and the tiny, terry cloth shorts that she came back from the bookstore with this afternoon—red with rolled hems and that show more of her legs than Clarke has ever seen. Even the mornings she returns to their dorm in nothing but her towel. It was the first thing she thought when Lexa pulled them on while her back was turned but she prays none of her friends will be blasé enough to point it out. If possible, Lexa looks even more out of place decked out in school colours than in her Oxford shirts.

She calls her over, and waits until Lexa has situated herself, back against the wooden panel of Octavia’s bed before leaning over. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, hand grazing Lexa’s bare knee. Static sends shocks of electricity up her fingers and Lexa flinches. “I didn’t mean to ambush you,” she checks herself and raises a brow conspiratorially, “you’re under no obligation to stay.”

The truth is she doesn’t know how to approach Lexa now. She hasn’t since their midnight conversation. What Lexa said after her conversation with her father got under her skin and she hasn't slept properly at night thinking about it. Lexa too has been restless in her own quiet way. Clarke thinks it has everything to do with her father and the mounting pile of unwashed laundry in the hamper beneath her bed, but every time she wants to pull her aside and assure her that being a certified mess is part of the typical college experience, something stops her. She thinks of herself and can’t shake the feeling that her intervening would be unwanted at best and overstepping at worst.

“I want to be here,” Lexa shakes her head and flashes her a smile. She leans further against the bed and draws her knees loosely to her chest as if to prove herself. Octavia rattles two DVD cases, demanding attention, and when the room choses ‘Mission Impossible: Fall Out’ over ‘Dead Poets Society’ by a seven to one vote—’Tom Cruise can scale me any time he likes.’ ‘Get higher standards Roma.’—Lexa peers at the TV with intent.

Ethan Hunt makes it halfway up the Burj Khalifa before Octavia springs up at a notification from her phone and excuses herself to meet the pizza delivery boy at the hall entrance. Raven leans forwards to pause the TV as they wait.

“If I’m letting anyone scale me,” she says, matter of factly, “it’s Rebecca Ferguson.”

Harper gives her a look of contempt. “You’re out of your mind,” she untangles herself from Monty, “have you seen Henry Cavill?”

Raven makes a so-so gesture with her hand and takes a draw of whatever she is hiding in her flask. When she winces, Clarke knows it’s strong. “He does nothing for me.”

“I forgot. Raven likes her men unshaven an anaemic.”

With a gasp, Raven leans forward to give Roma a clip around the head. “Wick and I had sex once,” she asserts. “What about you, Princess?”

Clarke groans at the nickname.

Realistically, she knew when she applied that going to college so close to home meant bringing with her a truckload of high school baggage, but she thinks Octavia took a little too much joy in regaling anyone who would listen with stories of Clarke winning homecoming Princess Junior Year and her place on the cheerleading squad.

When she thinks about it, she can remember watching the football team practice, tucked into her high school boyfriends jacket on the bleachers in her uniform, hair scraped back, Octavia chewing her ear off. She remembers the keys to the first car her parents bought in her hanging from her fingers, the cold metal of the insignia in her palm and their plans to drive into the city on President’s Day weekend. She remembers lip gloss stains on her bathroom mirror and the Coffee Bean before school and wearing Octavia’s dresses to Wells’ house when his father was out of state, reeking of ignorance and teenage self-importance—a heady a cocktail as any.

She hates the way the memories feel now though. They’re clunky and bright, like children’s blocks and she finds it hard to equate who she is now to the towering, technicolour form of her formative years that, most days, threatens to dismantle her entirely.

“Pardon?” Lexa asks suddenly, forcing Clarke’s attention away. She sits ramrod straight next to her, lips in a thin, unattractive line and fingertips whitening where they dig into the soft skin of her thighs.

“It’s a stupid nickname,” Clarke says pointedly and Raven has the good sense to look chagrined.

“C’mon Clarke,” Roma arches a brow, “you can’t say you don’t still have the crown.”

She does have the crown. She keeps it in the same box she keeps her father’s smile but that’s beside the point.

“Vanessa Kirby,” she says evasively, primly smoothing the snapped threads of her ripped jeans through her fingertips. Next to her, Lexa smiles and Clarke tries not to let her mind run rampant. Now that she’s relaxed her bare arm is pressed against Clarke’s and she can feel her body heat through the fleece-lined fabric of her hoodie.

Clarke wonders idly if it would too inconspicuous of her to strip down to her t-shirt just to be nearer but at that moment Octavia emerges from the corridor, balancing three boxes of pizza and a large bottle of soda in her arms and Clarke fights the urge to leap out of her skin.

Raven plays the movie while they share the pizza around the room. When passed a box, Clarke folds the lid beneath it and sits it on the floor between her and Lexa, and Harper and Monty, pulling the plastic contraption out of the middle of the pizza and watching it string with cheese. She pinches the biggest piece and hands the next to Lexa, cupped in a napkin.

“Sorry,” she curses softly as a spot of grease drips of her wrist and lands on the carpet in the triangle of Lexa’s legs. She reaches between them to smudge the spot with her thumb without thinking and stifles a squeak at the puff of breath on her cheek, looking up to find her eyes in line with parted lips. She swallows, gawking quietly. “Sorry.”

Something hard smacks her up the back of the head and she hisses in pain, biting her lip as she peers over her shoulder in time to see Octavia settling back into the wall of Lincoln’s chest, pointedly ignoring her. Clarke extends her middle finger behind her and turns back to the TV.

Beside her, Lexa is staring at her slice of pizza like it’s a foreign object. The soggy dough droops and the grease drips down her wrist despite her effort to keep it as far away from her as possible until Clarke reaches over, tentatively, and folds the slice in half. It seems to make it slightly more manageable.

“Don’t they have pizza in Denmark?” she teases quietly as Lexa leans in to take a bite.

Her eyes widen and the cords of her neck tighten. Clarke has the awful feeling she has said the wrong thing.

“Dødens Gab?” she prompts awkwardly.

She googled the phrase during class and it had taken some clicking before she was able to translate the foreign Wikipedia article into English from Danish. It makes sense though when Clarke thinks about it. She can see Lexa wrapped in a pea-coat, eating pastries in a cafe on a canal. She thinks of the prettily painted houses and the sailboats the come up when she enters Copenhagen into the search bar and it fits Lexa more than the rust colour arch of the bridge in the bay does.  

Swallowing, Lexa covers her mouth as she shrugs. “We mostly eat in,” she admits sheepishly.

They stare at each other for a long moment and Clarke feels as though there’s something else she wants to say. She waits. Lexa chews slowly behind the demure shield of her hand, eyes—dull in the yellow-white light of the dorm—straying from Clarke’s until the blonde is feeling self-conscious. She pulls the drawstring of her hoodie between her fingers and begins to smooth the knot through her fingers.

“What’s it like being away from home?” Harper pipes up, oblivious.

The rubber band of the word snaps back into place and the thick fog clears. Feeling responsible for the intrusion, Clarke readies herself to tell her to knock it off but Lexa slides a cold hand onto her thigh and it renders her incapable of doing much else.

“It’s different,” Lexa concludes with an obliging smile. “You’re culture is…”

“We’re a bunch of assholes,” Raven gives a throaty laugh, “you can say it.”

“Colourful,” Lexa continues diplomatically.

“Are you here on an exchange?” Lincoln asks.

Lexa shakes her head, a flash of doubt crossing her face before she answers, “transfer.”

The seven of them nod.

The rest of the night turns into a game of twenty-one questions that Clarke is deeply embarrassed by. Not because of the content of them—they are all mundane and her friends are genuinely interested in the enigma Clarke has brought into the midst of their Tuesday night ritual—but she can see that, as polite as Lexa is, she doesn’t want to be the centre of attention. She answers every question with a question for someone else and diverts to Clarke, strange panic in her eyes when something is brought up that she doesn’t understand. But she’s her own person. Clarke takes a sip from Raven’s flash and digs her back into the panel of the bed to stop herself from intervening.

* * *

By the time they make it back to their dorm, Clarke’s limbs feel heavy.

There’s a liquid warmth in her chest, despite the loss of her hoodie, but she is too busy appreciating the hot weight that has sunken to her fingertips to second guess her third can of beer. Preoccupied doesn’t begin to describe how she has been feeling lately. The narrowing of her mind to two simple tasks, that is knowing their room number and remembering how to put one foot in front of the other, is a pleasant reprieve from that.  

It feels nice to have a purpose, even if it’s just for tonight. It makes the world less fragmented.

She fumbles in the darkness for the light switch and flips it to find Lexa standing inches away, glassy-eyed and swathed in fabric. Halfway through the beer that Roma shoved under her nose insisting cheap alcohol was part of the ‘authentic college experience’, she had gone pliant. The stiffness that seemed to plague her melted away and when she shivered, Clarke, who was filled with liquid courage and the miraculous ability to act on bad decisions when she drank, was pulling her arms out of her sleeves before her mind caught up.

If Lexa thought it odd that she was literally giving her the shirt off her back, she hadn’t said anything.

Now, she is red-cheeked before Clarke, looking pale in the pale pink fabric of her hoodie and smelling ever so slightly of vodka. She is messier than she has ever been and there’s something so wonderfully possessive about the fact that Clarke has caused it. Like she has run her dirty fingerprints all over the pristine surface of her roommate and left her all the more human because of it.

“You’re cold,” Lexa says.

Suddenly aware of the goosebumps on her forearms, Clarke shivers. They left the window open while they were out and now the room is chilling and Clarke thinks they should give up on the pretence that summer will last any longer than it already has.

“Thank you for coming,” she swallows.

Lexa nods. “Thank you for inviting me.”

Clarke fixates on the way her fingers linger at the hem of her hoodie. Her nails are immaculate. Lexa catches her staring and, in a flurry of uncoordinated movement, she tries to peel it off over her head, knees knocking like a colt.

“You’ll want this back.”

“Keep it,” Clarke fastens her hand around Lexa’s forearm to still her, fingers sneaking around the neat curve of her wrist, warm from the heavy fabric of her hoodie. “It’ll go with your new look.”

Lexa smells like her. Clarke is close enough that she the scent of her own body spray and the detergent she uses is distinctive enough to recognise. That, paired with the sheer force of the smile on Lexa’s face is thrilling in its own special way. A bone-warming, particular kind of wonderful that Clarke feels deep in her gut.

She doesn’t think even Lexa herself knows she possesses a smile like that. If there is one thing she has learnt about her roommate in the three weeks she has been living with her it’s that Lexa acts as if the weight of the world is on her shoulders. She hates it, Clarke knows. She spends twenty-four hours of the day trying to dislodge it by doing these things that clearly don’t come naturally to her—coming with her tonight was one of them, Clarke suspects—and at night she strains for any sound of it shattering on the wooden floor of the dorm but it never does.

On the contrary, Clarke wishes there was something like that keeping her tethered to earth. The weight Lexa carries makes her firm and steady and Clarke wants to cling to her until she feels like she is walking on the ground again and not floating off into space.

She thinks about what Lexa asked her those nights ago and wants to tell her yes. Wants to cling to the cliffs of her shoulders and explain that she has already taken the plunge off of the edge of the earth and everyone around her was too busy congratulating her on keeping herself afloat to notice. She wants to say that she has been stewing in this strange kind of limbo for so long but then she came along, firm and strong and a little mysterious but mostly harmless, leaving her with the restless, unbidden urge to live in a way she hasn’t for months.

“Are you sure?” Lexa asks.

Clarke doesn’t peel her eyes away from the drunken quiver of Lexa’s lip as she talks.

“Yes.”

* * *

It’s light when Lexa stirs. Which is strange in itself because she hasn’t woken to light coming through her curtains since she left Denmark. She moves her fingers, one at a time, then her toes, then her head and realises, all too quickly, why it is she slept through her alarm.

She should have known this would happen. Unlike some of her boarding school peers who held titles like her but less regard for them, Lexa has never been the party princess she thinks the press wishes she was. Instead, years of no more than a glass of red wine over state dinners have left her with the alcohol tolerance of an eighty-six year old—two beers and a sip from Raven’s flask, and her pulse is throbbing in her mouth.  

Wincing, she casts a glance across the room to see Clarke, asleep beneath the both of her comforter. Her socked foot nudges the sheets—white with tiny yellow lemons that Lexa has learnt is part of a two-week wash cycle of unorthodox bedding—from where they are tucked under the mattress. She is as messy a sleeper as she is waking and with the windows closed, a large strip of skin is visible on her back, above the waistband of her shorts and below the hem of her shirt, where her muscles are lax.

Lexa tucks her lips over her teeth and stares at the ceiling, willing herself not to fixate on it.

Last night was fun. It’s the closest Lexa has come to acting her age since she slipped her minder to meet a girl at a cafe last time her family summered in Château de Cayx, but it ended on such an odd note, she had spent most of the night trying to figure it out.

She remembers feeling happy. Heavy and warm in Clarke’s hoodie and talking about silly things. After that, all there is is the way Clarke’s hand felt on her wrist and the sorrow in her eyes when she looked at her and the way she paused for too long when Lexa asked if it was fine to keep her sweater and it throws her off guard.

She comes to the conclusion that Clarke scares her. In the way that you never know what she’s thinking or what she will do. For a moment, Lexa will think she knows what is going on in her head, but then she will say something or do something completely out of the left field and Lexa will be forced back to square one.

She doesn’t like being at square one.

Crouching in front of her open closet she reaches blindly for clothes, pulling out a pair of tight leggings and a bulky hoodie stamped with the university logo in raised applique. It looks strange. She feels naked without the pressed crease of her trousers and her starched oxford shirts; the leggings cling to her hips and the hoodie hangs off the narrow set of her shoulders and she tucks a lank lock of hair behind her ear and peers at herself in the mirror.

For a minute she waits for someone to pull her aside and reprimand but no one does. The dorm is silent save for the steady thrum of life around them—microwaves churning, taps running, toilets flushing. All of the noises that Lexa has come to find strangely familiar. All the things she uses to remind herself that she isn’t at home.

Leaving Clarke asleep, she stops at the kitchenette on her way out of the building, popping two soluble tablets into her water bottle and screwing the lid on, wincing at the bitter taste of chemicals and faux-lemon flavouring as she walks to class.

It takes an hour and a half of a lecture on US foreign policy for her head to stop throbbing.

Five more find her scrutinizing the shelf of detergent, a bottle in each hand before she gives up and hefts them both to the check out with a packet of what she hopes are dryer sheets and a pot of instant ramen—the same brand Clarke eats.  

She waits until Octavia and Raven have come by to pull Clarke away from the sketch she has spent the better part of the afternoon working on before picking up her hamper. They invite her too. She thinks, or hopes rather, that she made an impression on them last night, but the look Clarke casts her way throws her off balance so she mutters something about plans before ducking out of the dorm.  

The laundry room is on the ground floor next to the games room with a broken pool table that no one seems to use and at this time of night, it’s empty. The dining hall has been advertising taco Tuesday for three days and while the American fascination with it went completely over Lexa’s head—frankly she misses Danish food and macaroni and cheese is only a novelty the first four times—it didn’t go over the heads of her floor-mates who left a ghost town in their wake.

She sets her clothes down on the lid of a machine and peers at the dial on the panel. It’s dingy and a bit grotty, she pries the lid open and shakes her clothes into the tub with a liberal dose of detergent before pressing the button and listening to it churn. For a moment, she allows herself to be proud. Then she schools herself.

Upstairs again, she pads to the kitchenette with her glasses on and fills her pot of ramen up at the zip, letting it sit. She wonders briefly what her father is doing if he’s as mad as she thinks he is or maybe, just maybe, if he’s a little bit proud of his wayward daughter standing up for herself. She has a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter.

Her ramen goes soft and she breaks up the noodles with a spotty fork from the draw before taking the whole concoction back to the dorm to read in her pyjamas and Clarke’s hoodie—she had it folded up in the bottom of her closet but Clarke isn’t here and she thinks she can get away with it. The smell of her lingers on the collar.

When she’s finished she ventures down to the laundry room again, glad she put a sweater on. Her load seems like it’s finished. The machine blinks orange her but it’s stopped making noises so she reaches in to pull out her clothes, frowning, affronted when her best oxford shirt comes up sopping wet and sudsy. She watches it drip soapy water over the tiles for a moment, an inexplicable urge to cry swelling in her throat which she quashes with a steel jaw.  

“No washing machines in Denmark, either, huh?”

Her body goes hot at the sight of Clarke leaning against the door jamb. She’s wearing soft cotton shorts and a short, black t-shirt and she doesn’t have a hamper with her or anything that would explain why she’s down here, which means she came to find Lexa. The thought alone gives way to a violent,

“I promise,” she says, “I’m not completely incapable.”

Except for the fact that she kind of is. She’s nineteen-years-old and she doesn’t know how to do her own laundry. Ironic, considering her father’s almost obsessive insistence she is prepared for her future. But the irony alone isn’t enough to abate the awful, useless feeling in her gut. 

To her credit, Clarke doesn’t say anything about it. Lexa files it away among the things about her roommate that are utterly remarkable.

Instead, she says, “you missed Taco Tuesday,” in a mild, affronted tone and nudges Lexa over with her hip, taking the sodden khaki chino pants from Lexa’s sudsy hands and wringing them out before putting them back in the tub of the machine. There’s a strip of tan skin showing above the waistband of her shorts and it widens when she leans over to turn the dial a notch further and press the start button. “In the realm of authentic college experiences, that’s like number two.”

“What’s number one?”  

“Getting drunk on a school night,” she laughs when Lexa winces. “How’s your head?”

Throbbing, Lexa wants to tell her. The last time she felt like this it was the day after her aunt married a Duke and her and her cousin got into the communion wine.

“I’ve had worse,” she lies.

Clarke pins her with an intent stare and for a terrifying moment, Lexa thinks she is going to call her out.

Nothing about her is subtle, she knows this. She wants to be normal. She wants desperately to be Clarke—with a homecoming crown in the back of her closet and an armoury of high school anecdotes that don’t involve media coverage of her first day. But she isn’t and the thought of Clarke knowing that sends her into a blind panic. Not because she wants to lie to her—it’s been three weeks but Clarke is suddenly more important than a good lot of things in her life—but because there’s an ease to their routine and their interactions that Lexa thinks she would find herself lost without.

“Do you want to go and get a coffee?” Clarke says after a moment of scrutinizing Lexa.

She feels stripped down and bare but sure enough to nod.

* * *

Clarke manages to convince Lexa she doesn’t need to change. It’s California after all. Clarke has seen worse on this campus than two girls ordering coffee in their pyjamas at eight p.m. on a Tuesday night and she relays as much to her roommate. It might be a ploy to keep Lexa in her sweater for a little longer—their bodies are different shapes and the thick, pink fabric hangs awkwardly off of her frame in the best way possible—but Clarke is above dignity at this point.

She buys them coffee with what she saves from her meal plan by eating ramen three nights a week—a habit her mother is getting antsy about, citing the food pyramids tacked to the walls of her surgery and Clarke has promised to eat real meals. Lexa cups her palms around the ceramic mug when it comes, smiling at her over the lip when she takes a sip.

“You haven’t done laundry since the semester started,” Clarke accuses her, narrowing her eyes, “is the thought of hanging out with me really that bad?”

She’s teasing but Lexa is so quick to disagree it momentarily gives her whiplash. “Honestly,” she says sheepishly, “I was in dire need of clean underwear.”

In the yellow light from the bare-bulb above them her eyes are so earnest it makes Clarke want to crawl out of her skin. The drawstrings of her hoodie lay uneven on her chest and there is a hair near her forehead that is so unreadable stubborn. Lexa blinks at her expectantly and she says the first thing that comes to mind.

“Well, as long as we’re sharing clothes you’re welcome to wear mine.” The regret that slams into her is ten tonnes in weight and has the force of a steam engine. “Oh god.” Dying of crippling embarrassment she watches Lexa’s face contort, go red, then smooth into something terrifyingly calm and diplomatic and all at once she hates herself for spending the majority of her summer holed up by herself in an old car. Her social skills have clearly gone out of the window. “That was a joke, Lexa.” She cringes. “I’m sorry. I say dumb things when I’m hungover.”

“It’s okay,” Lexa scrutinizes her nails mildly.

“It isn’t,” Clarke insists, face in her hands. “I made you uncomfortable.”

“I’m a big girl Clarke, I can handle a little discomfort.”

She says this stern-faced but with a quirk in her brow and Clarke has to wonder if they’re still talking about the joke. She blames Raven and her filthy, awful mind. This isn’t a date, she tells herself.

Instead, she says. “What’s it like being away from home for the first time?”

Lexa looks up in alarm but Clarke is genuine. It doesn’t take a PhD to see that Lexa is completely out of her depth. Clarke knows she’s smart. She’s seen her class notes and they feel more akin to a dissertation than jots off a slide and she’s well read and knows the strangest facts and funny in a way Clarke hadn’t guessed she would be when she turned up on move-in day with an angry Secret Service-like friend. But she’s also completely useless when it comes to being anything that resembles a functioning human being.

“I’m not—” Lexa starts to say, the beginnings of a frown between her eyebrows but she meets Clarke’s challenging gaze and stops. “It’s an adjustment,” she admits eventually, clean and curated.

Clarke can’t help but think there’s more. Clarke can’t help but think that a lot of the time when it comes to her roommate. She knows she isn’t exactly an open book—the proximity to the summer still has her reeling and whenever she wants to talk about what happened she finds it lodged in her throat—but their whole relationship this far has been unsaid things and it’s confusing.

Like for example, she has the most uninhibited, blinding urge to brush the stubborn curl of hair off of Lexa’s forehead and kiss her right now but, despite the fact that Lexa is quite literally wearing her hoodie, she has no idea what Lexa’s thoughts on the matter would be.

“I can’t pretend to be any better,” she admits grinning. “I spent the whole of last year bagging up my laundry to take home each week.”

“Do you live in the area?” Lexa asks, surprised.

“Forty minutes away,” Clarke amends, nodding. “Over the bridge. My Mom used to complain about how much she was paying for me to live on campus when I would be at home most of the time but she liked it really. I think she was scared I was going to go to the East Coast or somewhere equally as left-field.”

“But you didn’t want to?”

Clarke considers it.

She used to.

She looked into transferring very seriously this summer when the thought of being in San Francisco literally tore her flesh from bone but the closer she had gotten to making a decision the more she found she couldn't. The further away she imagined herself from home the more paralyzed she felt.

Clarke shakes her head. “They have an amazing pre-med program here.” She sees Lexa frown—she’s not doing pre-med anymore—but she changes the subject before it incites any more questions she doesn’t know if she wants to answer. “What about you? Where’s home?”

“Copenhagen,” Lexa answers with the fondest smile. Her stiffness slips away and all at once the image of her in a peacoat and scarf, against the backdrops of the canals and bright houses, returns to the forefront of Clarke’s mind. She blushes furiously. “We travelled a lot for my father’s work, though, to France and Germany. I went to school in Switzerland for a time.”

Thoroughly impressed, Clarke piques a brow. “What business is your father in?”

“Leadership,” Lexa says, fast and not-at-all eloquent. Her ears go red and she blinks into the steam from her mug before clasping her fingers around the handle. “Yours?”

Clarke pauses for a moment, feeling the almost familiar now weight pull inside her chest. She presses her lips together and fixes Lexa with a rueful look. “He died.” It comes out wistful and airy, a stale breath trapped in her chest because if she tries any harder it would be a sob.

All at once Lexa goes very still. Her face eases into something genuine and desperately sad and she leans over the table to slide a hand over Clarke’s seemingly without thought. It’s warm, bordering on hot from the heat of her mug and Clarke lets her fingertips drag against the back of her hand. When she looks up, Lexa is painfully close and staring at her with a kind of understanding that Clarke is thrown completely off balance by.

She doesn’t know how to equate this Lexa to her painfully collected, composed roommate. Or that girl to the one who waters the pot of ivy on her desk every morning with her glasses on. There’s so much about her that mystifies Clarke but she looks so remarkable sitting across from her now—not an assassin or a spy or a contract killer—that somehow, for now at least, it’s enough.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm *so* sorry for the wait! i have nothing to say for myself other than life got away from me for a bit

Jake died on a Sunday. 

It was sunny, Clarke remembers. Although that alone wasn’t shocking for California in July, it did carry a certain sting of betrayal as she sat on her hands on the vinyl cushion of the hospital chair, trying to ignore the way her skin stuck to the plastic.

She picked at a loose thread in the tough fabric with her nails and stared out the window, actively avoiding the white-washed hospital room in her field of vision—the crisp sheets and the smell of disinfectant that had been her childhood and now her nightmare—until the slither of skyline she could see through the glass swam on a wave of colours that burst behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes. 

It was too clinical.

One moment there were daisies wilting in the vase on the side-table and her father’s overnight bag—the one that always sat in the closet at the end of the hall next to the trunk Clarke took to summer camp—tucked beneath the bed and next, the bed was empty, the sheets were stripped and she was standing in the cemetery in a starched black dress, staring across the grave at her paternal grandmother, somehow more solid and alive at eighty than her father was at forty-seven. There was the removal of his books from the house and the closing of his study door against the two-months worth of dust that had accumulated during his time in the hospital and just like that, they were one person less than they had been. A swift progression from life to death like the lifecycle of the caterpillar her science had shown her in the third grade. Except now, she struggled to see how her father’s coffin could be a chrysalis. 

Since then, Sunday’s haven’t gotten any easier. If anything, they drag and clear-skied days have her stewing in a kind of limbo that no quest to regain the person she was before she left for Laguna Beach can break her out of. She tells her friends she isn’t more of a person for making it through her father’s death intact and maybe that’s true but the fact is, her world has been fundamentally altered whether she is knee-deep in grief and wailing or not. It doesn’t feel like the way she thinks it should feel; that aching, gaping sadness that she assumed for the longest time came with a loss so sudden and so unfair. Instead, her mother is buying new sheets for the mattress in the spare room and the bakery an hour out of the city she used to drive to on a Saturday morning has changed management and it’s like she is watching a piece of her old-self being sold of piece-meal. 

The scariest part about it is, that no matter how far out of her way she goes to find them again, her world refuses to right itself. 

* * *

 Clarke lasts a month of letting Lexa dress like an extra from a Ralph Lauren catalogue before stepping in. She sits cross-legged on a Sunday morning with a Tupperware bowl of Lucky Charms in her lap—the only viable option left in their communal kitchen after she stayed up late working on a sketch for Art 12—and watching Lexa fold her laundered pants on the crease and hang them in her wardrobe. Clarke’s own clothes haven’t seen the inside of her closet since the semester started but she has a system going even if no one but her can understand it. 

“Please tell me there’s a pair of jeans hiding behind all of those shirts,” she says, breaking the amiable silence that had settled over the room; the rattle of hangers and slow crunch of cereal that has become the soundtrack of the weekend days Lexa doesn’t spend in the library or at her desk. 

“Too hipster?” she guesses when Lexa cuts her a glare across the room: lips pursed but lacking any real heat. 

“Contrary to popular belief,” Lexa says without turning around. “I speak both English and sarcasm fluently.” She returns to slotting a pressed, white oxford shirt into the wardrobe next to five others of its kind but when Clarke leans sideways where she sits to gauge whether she is joking or not, she can see her smile. 

It’s a pretty smile, Clarke has decided. A rare one too between the glare she gives her politics textbooks and the patented frown she directs at most Americanisms she comes across—she’s beginning to think that Lexa wasn’t counting on the culture shock bothering her as much as it is but honestly? It’s endearing—and Clarke has thought of it as hers and hers alone since she saw it when she told Lexa she could keep her hoodie after movie night.  

Since then the sweatshirt has sat, folded in the drawers a the bottom of Lexa’s wardrobe and is pulled out when the A/C in the building breaks or Octavia and Raven invite them over and although she’s always telling herself she is going to steal it back when it lands in their communal load of laundry she almost never does. It means something now, she thinks, as sappy as it sounds. 

“Let’s go shopping,” she says so suddenly that she startles herself as well as Lexa who turns to her, finally, amid her newly-acquired post-laundry day ritual. 

“Shopping?” 

“For jeans,” Clarke says. 

Maybe the reason the world hasn’t been righting itself is that she hasn’t been trying hard enough. 

She looks at Lexa folding her shirts and thinks the secret to finding solid ground might not be to keep clawing her way back to where she had seen it last—beneath her feet the day she stood on her porch with her duffle bag over her shoulder to kiss her father goodbye while Octavia honked in the driveway—but to find it in some new place entirely.  

* * *

Shopping with Clarke was something Lexa hadn’t been expecting when she pulled Anya aside outside her father’s office, red-eyed and angry, and told her to book her a flight. 

In fact, Clarke herself wasn’t something Lexa had been expecting, but if her goal in fleeing Denmark was to get out from beneath her fathers thumb, she is sure there is no better way of doing so than standing half-naked in a fitting room of a back-alley thrift store, fastening a pair of second-hand jeans around her waist. 

The fitting room is boxy; there is barely enough room for the chipped mirror propped up on the piling carpet and whenever she raises her arms, her elbow catches on the rack of hooks screwed into the hastily assembled drywall. 

Behind her, Clarke stands in the doorway with the red velvet curtain—faded and ratty; not the kind her father’s staff would take kindly to having the furniture upholstered with she thinks idly—balled in a fist beneath her chin in such a way that has Lexa deciding the complete lack of understanding of personal space is an American thing, not just a Raven and Octavia thing like she had thought. If anything, Clarke’s comfort where she stands, lingering on the threshold of the fitting room while Lexa has her shirt rucked up her stomach to check puts somewhat of a dent in Lexa’s self-confidence. She watches Clarke in the mirror; the slip of blond hair she likes to tuck behind her ear but refuses to tie up, the boxy KISS t-shirt with the sleeves cuffed, the jeans that are just a little too big but somehow fit. She’s like that, Lexa thinks; a combination of things that don’t fit but do. A collection of halves, some of which appear solid, but only in the gauzy, iridescent way an empty chrysalis appears solid as it sits in the palm of a hand. 

Like an empty chrysalis and Lexa keeps expecting her to flutter away on the wind. 

Instead, she asks: “do they fit?” her hip pressed against the drywall erected to separate the fitting rooms into three and when Lexa doesn’t answer, she steps in and pulls the curtain along the rail behind her, the speed at which she does so and slides her finger beneath the waistband of the jeans Lexa has on has Lexa seeing stars.

She’s used to being dressed. She’s used to being stood on in front of the gilded mirror in what had been mother’s dressing room and prodded by her platoon of stylists, perpetually disappointed as they appraised the fit of Lexa’s gown. As though, no matter what they put her in—no matter the fashion house or how few vowels a designer’s name had—she never lived up to their expectations. Her ceremonial trappings always looked too gaudy or too plain. She was either not eating enough or eating too much, in which case they would hide their concern poorly over clip-boards and short-hand notes to let a gown out at the seams. 

Not once, since her mother moved out of the palace when she was seven-years-old, has Lexa ever gone to an event feeling every ounce of the _princesse_ her father told her she was and as a result, she’s come to hate fittings with a vengeance. 

This though was a different feeling entirely. For a moment, with Clarke’s fingers sending goosebumps up the dip of her spine, autonomy over her body is a vague notion at best. She curls her fingers into the tears in the denim of her jeans if only to make sure she can as Clarke sinches the waistband between her finger and her thumb. She pulls it so that it lies flat against Lexa’s stomach, and in turn, Lexa feels herself fall back into the cradle of Clarke’s hip, mouth open in an ‘o’ of surprise. 

When she looks up, some small part of her—the part that isn’t blushing deeply and trying to find an appropriate way out of the situation she finds herself in, or rather the person she finds herself pressed against—is glad to have found the threshold at which Clarke’s embarrassment kicks in. Her cheeks go red and Lexa feels more than sees Clarke cringe against her, withdrawing her fingers delicately and staring fiercely and a point in the mirror that is neither Lexa’s eyes or the way the top of her university branded underwear is visibly beneath the loose denim. 

“They're too big,” Lexa says—guesses really because she thinks the last time she wore a pair of jeans was before her mother’s untimely departure from the palace when her father went from approachable family man too focused monarch in the wake of his divorce—when they have stood for too long in silence. 

“You need a size down,” Clarke agrees, retreating. She pulls the curtain open to slip out of the fitting room at the same time as Lexa goes to unbutton her jeans and the squeak of surprise they both emit is enough to alert the sales assistant. 

“I can get you that,” she offers perkily, looking between the two of them, at Lexa with her shirt pulled down so far it has stretched and Clarke suddenly more frazzled than Lexa has ever seen her, including the weeks she has stayed up three consecutive nights in a row, drawing and eating Frosted Flakes from the box. Shaking her head, Clarke tells her she has it covered and flees.

* * *

They leave, finally, when Clarke deems the jeans that Lexa has on worthy of a place in her closet between her terry-cloth short-shorts and her oxford shirts. They’re Levi’s Clarke tells her and they’re too long for her legs but Clarke assures her they can roll them up as they stand at the register and hands over her credit card. 

She hands it over again a couple of minutes later when they return to the back of the store having gotten distracted by strategically placed ‘ON SALE’ rack and with each swipe of plastic, Lexa feels like she’s losing a piece of herself.

It’s an odd feeling. Everything she has ever been taught or told has said losing sight of who you are—in her case, she is a representative of her family and her father would hate for her to forget it—is a bad thing but this doesn’t feel wrong, it just feels different. 

Like the less like herself she feels, the easier it is to breathe. 

Clarke urges her into the back seat of her car before they move onto the next store—a single, lewd thought on Lexa’s mind as she does—and stands with her back to the door as she passes Lexa a white t-shirt with an aging brand logo from the plastic carry bag. The jeans come next. She lifts her hips from the seat to slip them on and thinks about Clarke’s fingers on the small of her back in the fitting room, ignoring the not, keening feeling that comes with it. 

It all feels very racy, even after her night of drinking in Octavia and Raven’s dorm room, or how close Clarke had been minutes earlier, and when she shimmies out of the car a moment later, neckline askew from her backseat quick-change act, she looks around self-consciously. 

“Trust me,” Clarke says as she kneels on the sidewalk, reaching down to the roll up Lexa’s cuffs. Her fingers brush Lexa’s ankle bone and goosebumps erupt over her skin. “A quickie in a parked car isn’t the worst thing people would’ve seen around here.” 

She’s been cool and calm since she returned to Lexa with a smaller pair of jeans, relatively similar to the pair Lexa had tried on as if nothing had happened, but now, Lexa feels like she’s overcompensating. Like beneath her shiny veneer she’s flustered and breaking inside. 

“You talk like people are having orgies in the street,” she replies, glad when Clarke pauses in her movements long enough for Lexa to know that her bravado has shaken her. Clarke looks up from where she kneels, throat bobbing before she gathers herself and stands, boldly leaning forwards to tuck the hem of Lexa’s t-shirt into the waistband of her jeans as though she wants to even the score. 

“Clearly you’ve never been to pride.”

* * *

With each shop they enter, Clarke feels herself slipping.

It’s like being so close to Lexa snapped something within her; like the belt that had been keeping her running had finally worn through and now she is free-falling. Keeping the pieces of herself together in the wake of it is a frenzied, frantic task and the worst thing is, Lexa has noticed. 

Clarke has enough to worry about—namely keeping her hands to herself lest she completely comes apart at the seams—without Lexa knowing she says dumb things when she’s sober too.  

She throws herself into shopping instead, pushing tops and dresses and second-hand sneakers into Lexa’s arms before she can protest, standing in the half-closed doorways of fitting rooms with her hands fisted in the pockets of her pants as Lexa wiggles into thick, colour sweaters and denim mini-skirts from the rack. 

Now that she has done it once she can’t very well retreat because that would mean questions—questions that Clarke has the answer to but doesn’t know if it would be appropriate to say. She can’t go any closer though, because the thought of it makes her cheeks hot and her heart beat faster, so she says yes, they’re fine, when the sales assistant passes by with an armful of clothes to re-hang and finds a point on the carpet to stare at whenever Lexa isn’t fully clothed. 

They leave Urban Outfitters with two pairs of socks, a mug and a set of patterned sheets for Lexa to use on laundry day and from then on, Clarke starts looking for things for their dorm room too. All of their decor from last year had been Raven and Octavia’s or hadn’t made its way back into her suitcase when she packed in September so that—except for the tapestry she took from her bedroom wall and the potted plant that now sits on Lexa’s desk—it’s drab. She puts patterned rugs and wall decals on the register alongside second-hand Ralph Lauren v-necks in Lexa’s size to rectify that, as well as tiny, useless bowls to hold knick-knacks she doesn’t have. 

Her selections are eclectic enough—and dumped onto the til with enough chaotic energy—that few of the girls who bag them haphazardly seem to have the courage to comment, let alone Lexa, who smooths her hands over the clothes they pick. It’s as if, if she runs fast enough, she can outrun that slipping feeling. 

Ultimately, whether or not she can, the chaos of it all ensures that Clarke doesn't have to make eye contact with her until they find themselves in a booth at Denny’s just after one o’clock. And even then, the Lexa that sits across from her now is so radically different from the one she left campus with that, when Lexa meets her eyes over the table, it’s almost OK. 

“You don’t have Denny’s in Copenhagen, huh?” Clarke says—she’s suddenly sure there’s nothing more violently American than the cracked, burgundy booths and sticky, laminate menus of a chain restaurant. It reeks of elementary school birthday parties and double-dates she attended before her eighth-grade dance but Lexa doesn’t give her the satisfaction of being correct. 

“Maybe you should visit before you make assumptions,” she says. 

Clarke’s brows shoot up to her hairline. “Are you inviting me home?”

For a moment, it looks like Lexa is going to say something serious. Hemmed in by the plastic bags and the edge of the sticky, wooden booth one on the side, Clarke feels simultaneously small and seen at the same time. Lexa is looking at her now like she did at the coffee shop on campus three weeks ago: like she is seeing something big. Like she knows what Clarke is doing and it scares her. 

She doesn’t want to be something big. 

Instead, after the server comes to take their orders, all Lexa says is “don’t count your chickens, Clarke” and Clarke thinks she’s relieved. 

It’s a strange feeling. 

Somehow the fact that Lexa knows something is wrong—big something that makes Clarke do things like dragging her to the city to buy jeans—but isn’t going to say anything about it sends the frantic, searching thing in Clarke to sleep. She thinks that, if she had known all it would take to feel this way was Lexa looking at her funny, she would have taken her to Denny’s the minute she walked in on move-in day—her secret service agent friend and all. They could have ordered burgers and onion rings all round and Clarke could have enjoyed being able to breathe using the full capacity of her lungs in a way she hasn’t in so long. 

She wants to thank Lexa but the immensity of it scares her too much to put into words. Instead, she leans over the table when Lexa has trouble picking up her burger with her hands, insisting she couldn’t ask for a knife and fork and tucking her pinkies around the back of the burger bun before directing it to her mouth.

It’s only when Lexa comes away from the bite with half of the sauce down her chin and half of the burger on her plate that she relents and Lexa calls the server over with a wave far too polite to ever mark her as an American to ask for utensils.  

“Do you miss home?” Clarke asks a moment later when they are eating in comfortable silence. She picks the pickle off the inside of her bun with her fingernail and fits the top back on, all while Lexa watches her amused. 

“I didn’t think I would,” she admits. 

“So you don’t?” 

Lexa shrugs. “I’m used to moving around,” she reasons. “When I was younger I was only ever at home out of term time—and even then we spent the holidays away.” 

“Don’t tell me,” Clarke guesses. “You have some fancy summer house in the South of France.”  

“Something like that,” Lexa hums and Clarke lets out a low whistle. 

“Maybe I will take you up on that offer.” 

It takes a while for Lexa to reply and Clarke wonders what ‘don’t count your chickens’ meant. 

When Lexa finally does tell her she might be waiting a while, she thinks she understands. 

She thinks about the way she looked around her bedroom on move-in day, scrutinising everything—the plants in their pots and blankets on her bed and the knick-knacks on her dresser and the clothes in her closet she wasn’t planning on taking—as though she was moving back across the country instead of forty minutes away. She thinks about the way she left a note for Abby in the kitchen because her mother was on an early shift again, promising to call when she got her room assignment but not that she would be home next weekend like she had the year before. 

She doesn’t think about the fact that she hasn’t been home since because she thinks it might give the thing currently slumbering in her chest a cause to wake but she thinks she understands anyway. 

She smiles. 

“How about we go to Florida instead,” she says, feeling a little bolder. 

Lexa blinks at her before smiling and Clarke grins back. 

Mission accomplished.

* * *

If the weekends her and Octavia spent driving into the city have taught Clarke anything, it’s that Goodwill is touch-and-go. Still, she pulls Lexa inside when they leave Denny’s an hour later, thinking of three-dollar Levi’s and the dress she found to wear to Octavia’s sixteenth birthday, pointing her to the end of one aisle while she stands at the other, leafing through racks until they meet in the middle with clothing hung over their arms. 

It had occurred to her at shop number four that she was coercing Lexa into spending more than she was comfortable with. Her own bank account wasn’t exactly wanting after a summer of self-imposed isolation but she knows more about Lexa’s bathroom routine than she does about her financial situation. It wasn’t until Lexa hadn’t blinked twice at a three-figure price tag that Clarke had stopped feeling guilty about the hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise sitting in the trunk of her car and forced herself to revisit her contract killer theory instead. What nineteen-year-old can afford to nod at a four-hundred dollar sundress as if to say ‘yes that’s an acceptable price’?

“What do you think?” Lexa asks, shrugging a worn leather jacket over her shoulders and stepping back for Clarke to see. The sleeves cover her palms so that her fingers peek out of the cuff and the white sleeves have gone yellow with age, the same with the panels on the body. When Lexa flips one side outwards with her fingers curled around the hem, the inside is lined with garish tiger stripes. It looks so tacky paired with Lexa’s collared jersey and new sneakers, Clarke almost wants to love it. 

“It’s very Ferris Bueller,” she decides, giving the zipper a good-natured tug before turning back towards the rack. 

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“Are you making fun of me again?”

“Not in the slightest,” Lexa insists, shaking her head and shrugging the jacket off of her shoulders. Her frown is sweet; dimples form above her brows and her lips purse as she concertina’s the jacket until she can hold it, folded over between her palms. Eventually, Clarke takes pity on her. 

“He’s from a movie,” she tells her. “My Dad and I used to watch it all the time.” 

She can see the DVD case sitting on the shelf in his study, the plastic cover warped into little ripples form the days it’s spent sitting on the top of the TV cabinet in the sun. When Clarke was younger Jake hated the movies Clarke saw with her friends. _Twilight_ , apparently, had nothing on _Ghostbusters_ or _The Breakfast Club_ but _Ferris Bueller’s Day Off_ was his favourite. ‘Life moves pretty fast,’ he’d tell her when she complained about her grades or cheerleading or being barred from going into the city with Octavia that weekend. ‘If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’ 

“We could watch it if you want?”

Lexa looks at her carefully, in a way that makes Clarke’s belly knot. She’s fully clothed but she suddenly feels as though she’s stripped herself naked in the middle of Goodwill and handed over a piece of her soul for Lexa to take. It makes her nervous. All of the relief their talk at Denny’s offered her has been snatched from her chest by the way Lexa holds her head and Clarke stares back at her, hoping upon hope for a reply. 

“I’d like that.”

Clarke breathes out. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

* * *

It’s dark when they get back to campus. 

Clarke has two text messages from Octavia: ‘we’re going out u wanna come?’ and ‘2 late we’ve gone’ but she doesn’t have the energy to contemplate going out to find them because, without the restless energy that has been her motivator since July, she feels tired. 

She parks at the back of the building instead, popping the trunk open and helping Lexa ferry their purchases up to their room, and by the time they have carried the last bags upstairs, she feels bone-weary in a way she hasn’t in so long. 

Lexa stands on the bare floorboards in ankle socks and her rolled-up jeans, surveying the carnage. 

She separates her clothes into piles by the shop, snapping the tag off each item as she goes. Her folding is still sloppy, even after a month of Clarke sitting her down on the floor of their room every Tuesday night to show her how—lying shirts face down on the floor and drawing the lines Lexa should fold down with her fingertips—but the way she works is sweet and methodical. When she comes across a hood, she leaves it out and folds it down once the rest of the sweater has been tucked into a passable square. 

Clarke doesn’t know any person who is as willing, no determined, to learn how to fold laundry as Lexa is. 

She takes her jacket out of the Goodwill bag last and smooths the plastic over her legs.

“I can’t believe you bought that,” Clarke laughs. 

“It’s sweet,” Lexa argues, holding the black, white and tiger-striped atrocity up to inspect. It looks less sickly than it did under the fluorescent lighting at Goodwill but it’s still painfully vintage and not in the good, sixty-dollar Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt way. 

“C’mere.” Clarke nudges her from where she crouches, bent over the big, paper Urban Outfitters bag that they had left at the foot of her bed. 

They move the empty bags off of the floor and roll out the overpriced rug she bought in the valley between their beds. It curls from being rolled up for so long and Clarke lines her shoes up along the edges, enlisting two pairs of Lexa’s oxfords too until it sits flat along the cold floorboards. They strip Lexa’s bed next. She argues that she just washed her sheets but Clarke ignores her in favour of shaking out the ones they bought and draping them over her bed to air while they stand on Lexa’s mattress to pin a tapestry to the wall with the thumbtacks from Clarke’s desk drawer. Another one goes up next to it, the cream and blush hues and geometric pattern of the first bunching against the plain white of the second and Clarke takes a moment to stare at the continuous line drawing of two pinky fingers linked that now sits draped above Lexa’s bed. 

Lexa stands next to her, huffing quietly as she balances on her toes on the mattress. She’d pulled her hair back into a haphazard bunch when they started their impromptu home decorating session but now a few, sticky curls escape at her hairline and at the nape of her neck. Her cheeks are rosy from exertion. She’s so different from the Lexa Clarke left campus with this morning and, while at Denny’s it had made it OK, now the sight of her jeans makes Clarke feel guilty. Guilty for acting weirdly, guilty for making Lexa feel like she had to wear what she told her to wear, guilty for using Lexa to assuage her own feelings. 

She thinks about it as she makes Lexa’s bed, folding the sheets into the tight hospital corners she learned from her stint volunteering in her mother’s department in the summer between junior and senior year. Lexa sits at her desk, feeding her pillow into its case. 

By the time she’s finished and lined up three, matching mugs on her desk topper—impulsively tipping her paintbrushes, pencils and charcoal out of their jars and arranging them inside each one instead—the guilt has manifested. It’s eight o’clock; they’ve missed dinner. Lexa has arranged herself on her bed with her glasses and a textbook, her back straight and a highlighter poised above the page. Clarke looks around for something else to primp but it’s all been tidied. 

She drums her fingers against the closed lid of her laptop. “Do you want to watch a movie?” 

Lexa caps her highlighter and looks over. “OK.” She closes her textbook and Clarke opens Netflix to find _Ferris Bueller’s Day Off_ in her continue watching queue. She scrubs it back to the beginning, then sits her laptop on top of her comforter, adjusting the screen and perching awkwardly on the edge of the mattress so that she can see.

She holds her breath as the title card flashes; the feeling she had back at Goodwill back with a vengeance. When she looks over though, Lexa sits ramrod straight, watching the screen with a patient smile on her face and it quells her nerves. Not for the first time, Clarke finds herself being grateful she was too late filing her housing application to get a triple with Octavia and Raven again. The calm that Lexa lends her is different from the familiarity of her friends—it feels more permanent than the band-aid fix that is pretending it’s still last year. 

She doesn’t think she believes in fate. The thought of her life being outside her own control terrifies her, mostly because it’s a feeling she’s had since Jake died. But she thinks about what Lexa said at Denny’s—’you might be waiting a while’—and wonders if they were meant to find each other.   

The space between them seems a little ridiculous when she thinks of it like that. 

She pauses the movie and goes to switch the lights off, clicking on her desk lamp on the way back to her bed. It sends a soft, yellow halo skittering across the room. Lexa frowns but doesn’t say anything, looking as though she is going to return to her studies until Clarke scoops her laptop off her bed and hands it to her, swapping it for her textbook. 

She manhandles Lexa until she’s lying back against the wall, pillow sandwiched behind her back and tucks herself alongside her, shimmying the laptop down their legs and pressing play. Her fingers smooth over Lexa’s new sheets, measuring the width of the tiny rainbows they’re printed with in the space between them. Lexa feels soft and pliable next to her; she looks younger, less polished up close than she does from afar and Clarke loves it. 

Lexa laughs at the movie—genuine and sweet—and so does Clarke even though she’s seen this movie so many times it might as well be written into her bones. She drops her head against Lexa’s shoulder, nose resting just above the well-worn collar of the t-shirt Clarke picked out for her and feels the vibrations of Lexa laughing against her week. Her body heats. 

God, she’s missed this. 

When she thinks about how all over each other her, Octavia and Raven were last year—always in each other’s laps and sharing each other’s clothes or limb to limb in the same bed when Clarke was too tipsy to climb up the ladder into her down—it’s no wonder that her self imposed isolation drove her to madness. 

Gently, she slides her hand into Lexa’s, feeling her fingers give way beneath the pressure like piano keys. 

She doesn’t want to be sad anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr if you want to ([@clarketomylexa](https://clarketomylexa.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading!


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